


Future, Present, Past

by Unlikelyoptimist



Category: Captain America (Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Angst, Disillusionment, Friendship, Gen, Post Avengers, pre winter soldier
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-19
Updated: 2014-04-19
Packaged: 2018-01-20 00:52:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 858
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1490656
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Unlikelyoptimist/pseuds/Unlikelyoptimist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Natasha sees the soldiers after the war ends, when they've been ground up in the great machine and spit back out, stripped of their faith, it always makes Natasha glad she's not one of them. She could never be; she never had faith to begin with. </p><p>When Steve Rogers sees the future, it makes him look back at the past, and wonder if the reason he's not adapting is because he doesn't have to; he's adhering to the same constants with different variables.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Future, Present, Past

Tasked with keeping an eye on how Captain America was adapting to the 21st century, she’d thought it a good sign, at first, when Steve stopped spending so much time at S.H.I.E.L.D’s training room, and more time in his apartment. After the events of New York, and the guns he’d found on the helicarrier, Steve had made a silent, firm point of only coming to base when he was called. It was amusing, in a way; to him, the guns had been a sign of betrayed trust. To her, guns were guns; the idea that one was acceptable and the other was not was merely a matter of perception.

She was less optimistic when most of the time when she came to pick him up, he was training anyways. It wasn’t punching bags anymore, since he’d no doubt realized that his neighbors might be alarmed by the sound of a punching bag colliding with drywall. Apparently he’d never taken to the big industrial gyms with their shining machines, either; S.H.I.E.L.D would have been pinged if he entered personal information into any kind of database, whether that meant for a Facebook account (he hadn’t made one) or a gym card. Eventually, it became clear that a little intervening might be necessary.

Training was a necessity, but she’d been around enough soldiers to know when the line between coping mechanism and fixation was being crossed. The next time she let herself in, he was doing pushups on his fingertips, and looked like he’d been doing so for hours.

"I’m shocked at you, Rogers. Pushups? 70 years, and you couldn’t think of a more creative exercise? That can’t be very challenging for you…"

He smiled as he pushed himself easily back into a standing position, grabbing a towel. He always smiled, and she wondered why every time. If she’d been him, she probably wouldn’t have smiled at all.

"Sometimes, simple is better. Besides, it’s not about how hard it is to do one; it’s how hard it is to do the next couple hundred." Shaking her head, she reached into her backpack as he turned to pour himself a glass of water.

"I brought you something. We were going through the archives again, found a box of your old stuff that somehow didn’t make it to the exhibit. My best guess would be that it was hidden under Coulson’s bed, which is how we missed it." She noticed his hand tighten ever so slightly on the cup at her casual mention. How he maintained his capacity for sentiment, she’d never know. After all, he’d seen so many men die; how could he let the death of one still consciously upset him weeks later?

"Anyways, I thought you might like this." She laid a book on the table and flipped it open, careful only to open it to the cover. There were two small, meticulously neat words on the inside. Steven Rogers. On the adjacent page, there was a vague sketch of the sky, and a date scrawled at the bottom.

He took the book carefully, rifling through the pages almost carefully. “Careful, that’s an antique now, Cap.”

"So am I, but you guys don’t seem too worried about my condition," he replied without looking up, a small smirk curling at the side of his mouth. He paused occasionally on one page or another, careful never to tilt it forward enough for Natasha to see. It was ridiculous; if she’d wanted to look, she could have scanned and copied every page on the way over with her cell phone.

"Thanks," he said finally, looking up to meet a face with raised eyebrow and impassable eyes. She nodded, standing and shouldering her backpack.

"Fury needs you at base tomorrow at 6. Maybe try and actually experience life outside four walls before then? There’s a barrista at that coffee shop you like who’s been debating writing her number on your plain coffee with two sugars for a week now." Smiling at his indignant expression, she turned to leave. As she closed the door, she caught the neighbor glancing at Steve’s door; she nodded at her, and added her name to the mental list she’d been keeping.

Steve sat at that table for a while longer, his sketchbook opened to one page. Now it smelled of dust and the neglect of 70 years, but he remembered when the pages had curled upwards in damp air, sketching on it in the scant light of a dim tent while rain transmuted dry earth into mud outside.

Fury’s voice echoed in his head. “Times have changed, Cap…” He saw guns with pulsing blue, the brief lapse in levity on Stark’s face when he’d seen the first few pages of S.H.I.E.L.D’s hacked file. He saw himself, following orders without knowing whose best interest those orders had in mind.

"Not that much," he snorted, standing and heading for the shower. On the table the sketchbook remained open to a drawing of a trained monkey, balancing on a unicycle with a vapid smile on its face.


End file.
